1. Field of the invention
The present invention generally relates to a print data control system, and in particular to system and method for processing and transferring data from a host computer to a printer.
2. Description of the Related Art
There have been proposed several methods which expands print data to bit-map data at a high speed. For example, a print control method for a page printer has been disclosed in Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 4-67964. According to this print control method, print data is mapped onto a bit-map memory by selectively using a mapping software program and a mapping-dedicated hardware circuit depending on conditions of print data.
However, under the limited transfer capability of an interface between a host computer and a printer, such an increasing speed of data mapping cannot provide expected performance. In other words, the interface produces a bottleneck in high-speed printing process.
Especially, in the case of a large amount of data such as full-color print data, the print speed is remarkably reduced. Further, in the case of print data including both full-color image ata and text data, the whole print speed cannot lead to reduced print time because it is difficult to reduce the time required to mapping the full-color image data.